US officials probing Minnesota ICE protest that disrupted church service

Video showed protesters inside the church chanting "ICE out" and "Justice for Renee Good", the woman killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis earlier this month.

Justice department officials, who accuse the protesters of "desecrating a house of worship", say they will investigate them for civil rights violations. President Donald Trump has called them "agitators and insurrectionists".

Anti-ICE protests continue in the state against Trump's immigration crackdown.

Reuters Demonstrators stand in a row in front of members of US Customs and Border Protection and other law enforcement officials, near the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building. 

Federal agents are dressed in black and wearing gas masks that cover their face. Demonstrators are wearing plain clothes. Some in the back are waving an upside-down American flag.Reuters

Anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis have ramped up after the fatal shooting of Renee Good by an ICE agent on 7 January.

Over the weekend, ICE officers arrested a naturalised US citizen at his St Paul home, after breaking down his front door.

Videos showed officers escorting Chong Ly Thao, clad only in shorts with a plaid blanket over his shoulders, out of his house with his hands behind his back. Images of the 56-year-old walking to a car in his snow-covered neighbourhood with an ICE agent at each elbow quickly spread across social media.

Thao was returned home later on Sunday.

"I was praying. I was like, God, please help me, I didn't do anything wrong. Why do they do this to me? Without my clothes on," Thao, a Hmong man born in Laos, told Reuters.

The Department of Homeland Security told Reuters that officers were investigating two individuals convicted of sexual offences who were linked to the address. Thao's family told Reuters that one of the individuals of interest previously lived at the address, but had moved out.

The Pentagon has reportedly put 1,500 soldiers on standby for possible deployment.

On Sunday, US Attorney General Pam Bondi vowed to exercise the "full force of federal law" against the demonstrators who interrupted the service at the Cities Church in St Paul, which neighbours Minneapolis.

Later on Monday, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said on X that the justice department "will pursue federal charges in this case".

Protesters say that one of the church's eight pastors, David Easterwood, is a local ICE official.

Easterwood was not leading the service on Sunday.

A person by the same name is identified in ACLU court filings as the acting director of the ICE St Paul field office, according to reporting by the Associated Press and the Minnesota Star Tribune newspaper.

The AP also reported he appeared alongside Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem in Minneapolis at a news conference last October.

The BBC has contacted the church for comment.

In a statement, DHS said it did not confirm or deny the identities of its agents as "publicizing their identities puts their lives and the lives of their families at serious risk".

Monique Cullars-Doty, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter Minnesota and one of the protest organisers, told CBS News, the BBC's US partner, that "we can't sit back idly and watch people go and be led astray".

In his comments on social media in the early hours of Tuesday, Trump described the actions of protesters at the church as a "raid" that was the work of "professionals".

He went on to write: "They are troublemakers who should be thrown in jail, or thrown out of the Country."